Via John Lauritson, a very interesting gay writer. He writes from a POV of Gay Liberation, which was one of the Liberation movements of the 1960’s. This movement was actually a lot different from the modern gay rights movement, which is really just another Identity Politics movement.

Gay Lib actually had a lot of nice things going for it, or at least some aspects of the movement did. The modern version of the Gay Liberation can be seen in the Radical Faeries, which is actually a pretty cool movement (even though I’m not wild about gay movements)!

Gay rights isn’t even much of a progressive movement anymore.

A certain pattern emerges. The people in power do not like movements for social change. When such movements are in their infancy, they will try to destroy or divert them. When movements have grown large and viable, then they will try to render them innocuous through co-optation.

It would have been inept for the ruling class to send someone into an antiwar conference who would say: “Look here, folks, I’m from the council on Foreign Relations, and we don’t like what you’re doing. The Vietnamese people are giving us a hard enough time over there, and we don’t want trouble on the home front. So forget about this mobilization. Why don’t you just break into small groups and discuss patriotism?”

That speech would not have been well received.

However, what could be done was to send in representatives of “oppressed groups” — including blacks, women, and gay liberationists — to charge the antiwar movement with being white, male, middle class, racist, sexist, elitist, etc., and to demand that it deal with these issues rather than trying to stop the war in Southeast Asia.

Just like is being done with the Occupy Movement right now. Have you noticed all of the Identity Politics idiots screaming about how the Occupy movement is run by White men and is hostile to Blacks, wimmins, gays, people in wheelchairs, dwarves or whatever? The same result: splinter the movement.

Problem is these Identity movements go on forever. Even in the most progressive circles, some poor babies are always being oppressed. Oh boo hoo. So we need to shut down the whole movement, run out the men or the Whites or shame them and have an endless conscious raising session. Meanwhile the Right and the rich carry on doing whatever while we fight and stare at each other’s navels.

The Identity problem never gets solved (note how we are still fighting Identity battles in 2012 the same as we were in 1972, the movement gets splintered, and the Right cleans up and walks away with glory, power and loot.

The only really important movement has always been about class, and class tends to wipe out most of the other messes. Give people enough money, and they grow to like the Blacks, wimmins, gays or dwarves that also have some money.

Lauritson also logically pointed out, way back in the 1970’s, that feminism had morphed into puritanical, censorious, man-hating bullshit. He noted that there was nothing liberating about this nonsense, and it could in no way be called Women’s Liberation. He points out that feminism is a reactionary diversion from Women’s Liberation. Well, of course it is. For this crime, he’s been vilified as a misogynist.

One response to “The End Result of Identity Politics and Political Correctness”

With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the corporatocracy pays people like Tim Wise and Jane Elliot a handsome salary to yell at its white employees, or that the Rockefellers funded the feminist movement. You’ll see identity fetishists like Tim Wise appear in the mainstream media all the time, but as Noam Chomsky once pointed out (one of the few instances I’ll agree with him), there’s not a single Socialist or Marxist within the MSM.

As someone who once studied identity politics (as part of some GE sociology class), you’re indeed right that there is always SOMEONE who’s oppressed, subjugated, blah blah blah.

Even within a female chicana/Latina movement in decades past, for example, you had Lesbian or tranny latinas complaining that within that group they were oppressed, denied a voice, etc.

What’s the end result? Rather than creating a viable anti-war movement or curbing the power of the plutocracy, you get an endless pissing contest about who’s the most oppressed, calls to “check your privilege,” and nothing gets done.

Even though my views have mellowed tremendously as of late, I stand by my hostility to the modern American left, and my refusal to join it. A white man who supports today’s American left is just like a liberal who, to paraphrase Robert Frost, refuses to take his own side in a fight.